Controlling the Thoughts and the Tongue

Unceasing repentance is not a feeling but a discipline, and the discipline St. Sisoes the Great is remembered for is watchfulness — the guarding of the heart against the thoughts (logismoi) and the guarding of the tongue against idle and angry speech. This file sets out the practical ascetic teaching of the Sisoes sayings: how the monk observes and cuts off the thoughts before they take root, how anger in particular is to be mastered, and how the silence of the desert is the outward form of its inner vigilance.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; model of repentance)

Watchfulness Over the Heart

The desert tradition developed a precise spiritual psychology of the inner life centered on nepsis, “watchfulness” or “sobriety” — the constant attention by which the monk observes the movements of his own heart and refuses consent to the passions before they master him (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). The fathers held that sin begins not in the deed but in the thought (logismos): a suggestion enters the mind, the soul either rejects it at once or entertains it, and if entertained it grows through stages — coupling, assent, captivity, passion — until it issues in action and at last in a settled habit of vice (Harmless 2004; the eight-thoughts schema is associated especially with Evagrius and the desert tradition Sisoes inherited). The whole art of the desert is to meet the thought at its first appearance, while it is still small, and to cut it off before it can take root.

Sisoes’ sayings stand within this teaching. His counsel to the brothers who came troubled by their thoughts is the desert’s counsel: keep watch over the heart, do not consent, return again and again to God in prayer and self-accusation (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984). The guarding of the heart is the practical underside of his teaching on repentance: the soul that watches its thoughts and refuses them is the soul that keeps turning to God, and the soul that lets the thoughts run is the soul that has stopped repenting. Watchfulness is repentance made concrete, moment by moment (see Repentance Without End).

The Mastery of Anger

Among the thoughts, the Sisoes sayings give particular attention to anger (orgē). The desert regarded anger as especially destructive of the inner life, because it makes prayer impossible: the soul cannot stand peacefully before God while it is at war with its neighbor (Ward 1984, introduction). The Sayings show a brother coming to Sisoes troubled by anger and asking for help, and the elder counseling the patient, persistent labor of self-restraint — not the suppression of the feeling by force of will alone, but its uprooting through humility, the refusal to insist on one’s own rights, and the readiness to bear wrong rather than avenge it (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984).

The desert’s cure for anger is therefore not technique but humility. The angry soul is the soul that defends itself, that demands its due, that cannot bear to be wronged; the humble soul, having accused itself of everything, has nothing left to defend and so cannot be provoked (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. The Humility of Sisoes). This is why Sisoes’ teaching on anger is of a piece with his whole portrait: the same self-accusation that keeps him repenting keeps him from anger, for the man who blames himself for all things has no one left to be angry with. The mastery of anger is humility made practical in the face of provocation.

Anger and the Refusal of Self-Justification

The deepest root of anger, in the desert’s analysis, is self-justification — the soul’s insistence on being right, on defending its honor, on having its due. The angry monk is the monk who cannot bear to be wronged, who must vindicate himself, who answers an injury with an injury (Ward 1984, introduction). The cure, accordingly, is not merely to restrain the outburst but to uproot the self-justification beneath it, and this is the work of humility and self-accusation: the monk who has accused himself of everything has surrendered his claim to be right, and the surrender disarms the anger at its source (cf. The Humility of Sisoes). The desert told stories of fathers who, when wronged, blamed themselves rather than the wrongdoer, and so passed through provocation untroubled — and it held this self-accusing peace to be the mark of a soul truly free of anger.

Sisoes’ teaching belongs to this analysis. His counsel against anger is of a piece with his whole teaching on humility: the way to be free of anger is to stop defending oneself, to bear wrong rather than avenge it, to accuse oneself rather than one’s neighbor (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984). This is not passivity or weakness but the hardest of all spiritual labors — the surrender of the self’s deepest demand, the demand to be vindicated. The monk who masters anger in this way has mastered not merely a passion but the pride that feeds it, and has come a long way toward the peace that the desert sought (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004).

The Guarding of the Tongue

The guarding of the heart issues outward in the guarding of the tongue. The desert prized silence (hesychia) above almost every other discipline, holding that the monk who cannot control his speech cannot control his thoughts, and that idle words scatter the soul as surely as idle thoughts (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). The fathers warned against talkativeness, against judging others, against the speech that excuses oneself and accuses one’s neighbor — the very inversion of the self-accusation the desert sought. The maxim runs throughout the Apophthegmata: better to be silent and seem a fool than to speak and be exposed; the monk should weigh every word, and many words are the ruin of the soul (Ward 1984, introduction).

Sisoes embodies this. His own sayings are among the briefest in the collection — a sentence, a question turned back, a confession of his poverty — and their brevity is itself the teaching (see The Long Ascesis). The man who has spent decades in stillness speaks rarely and weightily; the economy of his words is the fruit of his silence. To guard the tongue is, for the desert, not merely to avoid evil speech but to keep the soul recollected, undistracted, turned inward toward the prayer and the watchfulness in which alone it can meet God. Speech that does not serve this is to be foregone, and the few words that remain carry, for that reason, the density of the silence they break.

The Patience of the Work

A feature of Sisoes’ teaching on the thoughts deserves particular emphasis: its patience. The desert did not promise quick victory over the passions, and Sisoes’ counsel reflects this realism. The Sayings preserve an exchange — recounted in various forms across the desert literature and characteristic of the fathers’ approach to anger and the other passions — in which a monk struggling with a fault asks how long he must labor against it, and the elder’s answer is, in effect, until his last breath: the work of uprooting the passions is the work of a lifetime, accomplished not by a single heroic effort but by the daily, patient refusal of consent, repeated through years (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. the desert’s insistence that the monk who falls must simply rise again and continue). This patience is itself an expression of humility: the monk who expects to be quickly free of his passions is secretly proud, imagining himself capable of a rapid sanctity; the humble monk accepts the long, unspectacular labor, falling and rising, never counting himself victorious, exactly as Sisoes never counted himself to have begun (see Repentance Without End).

This patience also guards against the despair that the struggle with the thoughts can breed. The monk who watches his heart sees, often for the first time, how disordered it is — how many thoughts rise, how persistently the passions return — and this sight can crush a soul that expected progress. The desert’s answer, and Sisoes’, is that the very seeing is progress: to perceive one’s own thoughts is already to have begun to watch over them, and the soul that keeps returning to God after each fall is doing precisely the work that saves it (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). The discipline of the thoughts is therefore not a contest to be won but a way to be walked, with patience, to the end.

The Unity of the Discipline

The thoughts and the tongue are not two disciplines but one, for the inner and the outer life are a single fabric. The monk who watches his heart speaks little, and the monk who guards his tongue keeps his heart; conversely, the one who lets his speech run loose loses the inward watch, and the one who lets his thoughts run cannot keep his speech (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes’ teaching binds them together under the one labor of nepsis: a constant, humble attention to oneself, inward and outward, that refuses consent to the passions and keeps the soul perpetually turned toward God.

This discipline is what makes unceasing repentance possible in practice. Repentance without end (the theology of the previous file) would be an abstraction if there were no concrete work to do; the guarding of the thoughts and the tongue is that work — the daily, hourly labor by which the soul keeps turning to God. In Sisoes the theology and the discipline are one: the man who said he had not yet begun to repent was the man who watched his heart, mastered his anger, and weighed his every word, to his last breath. The discipline was the repentance, made visible in a life.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Sisoes collection; the sayings on the thoughts, anger, and the guarding of the heart and tongue.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The inner discipline of the desert.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The logismoi, the eight thoughts, watchfulness, and hesychia in the desert literature.)